The same can't be said for Outlook. It has had a minor facelift from Outlook 2003 but it is still the same package underneath and it has a lot of failings. I thought I'd have a bit of a gripe about them.
First, in every other Microsoft application that I use CTRL-F is the shortcut for "Find". Makes sense as a standard. Use it all the time. But in Outlook CTRL-F is "Forward". Bah! On top of that, F3 is "find a message in this folder" and F4 is "find a string within this message". Not consistent at all. Really annoying.
I connect to an Exchange server and download email from three other POP3 accounts, two of which are hosted by the same provider. For some reason, one of the two connections downloads email at about 2-3 message per second and the other downloads email at about one message per 5 seconds, hogging CPU and disk while it does that. No idea why - the connections are to the same destination mail server. On top of that I've just reinstalled XP on my laptop (no Vista for me! More on that later) and the same issue occurs.
And while I'm on the topic of POP3 - I don't like things that save my password so I've got that turned off. Consequently, Outlook prompts me for passwords whenever I restart it. No problems with that. But when it prompts for POP3 account passwords it pops up the password dialogue over every other application. And this is despite having used TweakUI to stop applications from stealing focus. To compound the stupidity, Outlook will even pop up the dialogue over its own password dialogue boxes. So, you'll be typing the password for one POP3 account and it will interrupt you with the next one. Really stupid.
To top off the POP3 annoyances - if you put Outlook into "Offline" mode and then back into "Online" despite being set to check for mail every 5 minutes it may take up to an hour (normally somewhere around the 25-30 minute mark though) for Outlook to initially check the configured POP3 connections. You can force it by pressing the Send/Receive button but why does it wait that long?
I'm not a fan of rich-text email so I have it set to plain-text only - both new messages and replies. But if I receive a rich-text email and reply to it Outlook will happily inherit some random formatting from the received email and apply it to my (supposedly) plain-text reply. And if I delete a few lines here and there in my response it will choose yet another random style to apply to that. Also, despite having told the advanced cut-and-paste options to always paste in plain text, pasting from another Microsoft application (like Excel) will result in another style change. Aaaargh!
I've got the application set to automatically highlight URL and email addresses so that I can click on them. Make sense, I guess. Occassionally it guesses wrong but no big deal. But, if you've just typed in a URL and you want to delete (say) the "h" from "http", pressing the Delete key doesn't do anything except select the URL. Pressing Delete again deletes the whole URL. Most annoying.
In the advanced options it isn't clear what the difference is between "Autoformat" and "Autoformat as you type". My guess is that the former is for received email while the latter is for emails you are creating. This doesn't really fit with the options that are available but it's the best I can think of. Anyway, the real problem here is that the two pages in the options that deal with these two things have the same options listed but in a different order. Come on, Microsoft - how about some consistency?
Because I'm often out of the office I run Outlook in cached mode. This works pretty well and is quite reliable (compared to earlier versions). But, if you try and delete an email from a folder that hasn't been synchronised to the server yet you get a message telling you that you can't do that. Why can't it just delete the message and work out what to do behind the scenes? Oh for the days of Lotus Notes where it knew what to do. Having said that, the Notes interface generally sucked even if the underlying replication technology was top-notch.
There are lots of other minor things that annoy me too but this will do for starters. I'll just wander off and have a beer now.